Did Trump Know What Epstein “Stole” Virginia Giuffre For?

Can Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of the best-known victims of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghirlaine Maxwell’s sex-trafficking crimes, possibly get something approaching justice, just months after her suicide at 41? Perhaps not in the short term, while Donald Trump is abusing her memory by calling her one of the Mar-a-Lago ”people” Epstein “stole” from him. 

When Trump first made the accusation about his once-close friend on Monday, he didn’t mention Giuffre. 

“For years I wouldn’t talk to Jeffrey Epstein, because he did something that was inappropriate…. He stole people that worked for me.… And he did it again. So I threw him out of the place [Mar-a-Lago]. I’m glad I did.”

But he brought up the issue again, traveling with reporters on Air Force One. When one of them asked if he was referring to Giuffre, he said yes. “I think she worked at the spa. I think so. I think that was one of the people. He stole her. And by the way, she had no complaints about us … none whatsoever.”

“None whatsoever?” Giuffre frequently told investigators she was not the only young woman “procured” by Epstein and Maxwell at Mar-a-Lago. Yes indeed, Donald, she had “complaints” about your close friends using your resort as their sex-trafficking poaching grounds. “We now know from the words of the President himself that Virginia was right all along, and that she was trafficked out of Mar-a-Lago,” one of her lawyers told CNN on Thursday.

Giuffre’s family also responded, telling The Atlantic on Wednesday night that they were shocked Trump would brazenly describe her as “stolen.” 

“It makes us ask if he was aware of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal actions, especially given his statement two years later that his good friend Jeffrey ‘likes women on the younger side … no doubt about it,’” Giuffre’s two brothers and her sisters-in-law told The Atlantic. “We and the public are asking for answers; survivors deserve this.” 

What was meant to be a “fun summertime job” for the high-schooler led to at least three years of sex trafficking, her family added. And despite the great resilience that led her to become a champion of trafficked girls and women, it also left wounds that were reopened by a violent marriage and contentious divorce, all leading to her suicide, from which her family says it is still “reeling.”

The Roberts family is not just outraged by Trump’s casual invocation of their sister as merely a worker Epstein poached from him. They are also speaking out about the news that Trump’s deputy attorney general (and former defense lawyer) Todd Blanche met with Maxwell, who is serving 20 years in prison for her conviction on sex trafficking and other charges, over two days last week.

“If our sister could speak today, she would be most angered by the fact that the government is listening to a known perjurer, a woman who repeatedly lied under oath and will continue to do so as long as it benefits her position,” Giuffre’s family told The Atlantic. 

CNN reported that Maxwell was negotiating over a subpoena from the House Oversight Committee, and insisting on immunity for any information she might provide. 

“I don’t think there are many Republicans that want to give immunity to someone that may have been sex trafficking children,” GOP committee chair James Comer said last week, at least establishing a bottom line on child sex trafficking for bottom-dwelling Republicans. Good to know.

I can’t help but think about so many of Trump’s widely known sexual predations, which nonetheless didn’t bar him from a second term as president. I feel too exhausted to list more than the highlights: the “Access Hollywood” tape where he admits he’s a sexual assaulter; E. Jean Carroll’s vindication when Trump became an adjudicated rapist after a jury believed her claims that he sexually assaulted her in a department store dressing room; Stormy Daniels’s claims he paid her to cover up a tawdry affair while he was running for president in 2016.

But one story about Trump that surfaced in 2016 didn’t get much traction. This week writer Kate Manne went into vivid and, until now, wildly under-reported detail about the allegation by “Katie Johnson” (a pseudonym that she adopted) that Trump raped her at an Epstein party when she was 13. “It was widely dismissed when it surfaced in 2016 partly because what Katie was saying was judged just too incredible when it came to Epstein’s sex trafficking of teen girls,” Manne writes on her Substack, noting that the blockbuster Epstein exposé by the Miami Herald’s Julie K. Brown didn’t appear until 2018. Johnson was also said to have been coached in her story by an allegedly unscrupulous, Democrat-friendly handler.

Offering a trigger warning at the top of her post—consider this a warning, as well—Manne goes into great detail about Johnson’s story, which is stomach-churning. (Go to Manne’s Substack to read it in full.) I’ll just clip this, about a “rape fantasy” Trump said he wanted to enact with the teenager:

[Trump] ripped off all my clothes and he started to basically have sex with me and I was screaming. I’d never had sex before, it was my first time and [Epstein’s handler] Tiffany was yelling at him too. She was saying I was a virgin and he told us to just shut the fuck up and just basically took my virginity while I was crying and telling him to stop and basically begging for him to just stop…

[Afterward] I was crying and Tiffany was consoling me and she was apologizing. She told me that she would never put me in that situation again. But he comes over mad because I was crying and he said that I should be thankful that someone like Donald Trump took my virginity. Well, he didn’t say took my virginity. He said, I should be glad that someone like Donald Trump popped my cherry and not some pimply little 14 year old. And I just was like, “What if I get pregnant?” Not even talking to him. I didn’t want to talk to him. I was talking to Tiffany and he said, “Well you’ll get an abortion then, bitch.”

The woman Johnson identified as Tiffany submitted a sworn affidavit confirming the story, according to Manne. 

I remember reading about Katie Johnson in 2016 and deciding to forgo circulating her story because, indeed, it was so extreme (and yet, not unimaginable for Trump, even back then). Manne concludes, sarcastically I think, that the real “conspiracy theory” about Trump-Epstein is that so many young women who didn’t know one another have come forward with such similar stories. She lists most of them. You have to read the whole piece (which includes Manne’s full transcript of Johnson’s video.)

I went into the sick proprietary connotations of the word Trump used about Giuffre—“stolen”—on Tuesday. But the fact that he recognized her name, could he have known what Epstein “stole” her for? She worked for him 25 years ago, and clearly he knows her name from the coverage of Epstein’s and Maxwell’s crimes. But the way he blithely admitted that Giuffre was one of the girls Epstein “stole,” suggests that he certainly did, and does.

I’m sorry that this sick episode is causing pain for Giuffre’s family. But I’m hoping it will cause even more pain for Trump, and sometime soon.

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